


Dandelion Crown

by deltachye



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Childhood Friends, Fluff and Angst, One Shot, Other, Pining, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 15:13:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19793521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deltachye/pseuds/deltachye
Summary: [reader x tobio kageyama]doesn't everybody wish their first love becomes their last?[DW19]





	Dandelion Crown

The flower crown that’s poorly weaved from accidentally squashed dandelions serves as a placeholder for your ring. There were only enough flowers with long enough stems for one, so you wear that on your head while he receives some grass blades that are carefully braided together. You grab each other’s hands, facing each other.

“I, um, will love you forever?”

You both don’t really know how weddings actually go, only having seen them in movies. It seems about right. The two people say some stuff and then they kiss and then you throw the flowers. You don’t have a white dress, but the muddy blue one your mother makes you wear all the time should suffice. (Pink is for _girly girls_ , which you proudly—at least for a couple of years until you grow out of this stupid phase—are not.) Your bouquet is made up of the dandelions that are old and fluffy, and instead of flinging them across the field, you blow gently so that they break away and fill the air with fairy dust. Even though it’s make-believe, Tobio is blushing furiously.

“Do we have to kiss?”

“Yeah,” you insist emphatically, dropping the now-empty stems. “Everybody on TV does.”

“But…” He’s shy and clams up, his fingers locking together as he shifts his weight from foot to foot. You’re not as reserved as he is and butt your head forwards aggressively.

“So? Kiss me already, Husband!”

He hesitates again and you, with toddler impatience that’s god-tier, get angry.

“Is it because you hate me?”

“No!” he exclaims, quickly enough to reassure you with instant gratification. His face is so brightly scarlet that it makes his deep blue eyes shimmer like the surface of a slow moving brook. “I just… don’t know… how.”

“Me neither,” you say defiantly with a shrug. “The people on TV just smoosh their faces together. It doesn’t look that hard.”

You can still sense that he’s uncomfortable, though. But since he already said that he was okay with kissing you, you just decide to take the initiative again. It feels stupid, smashing your lips into his face. Not at all romantic or happy like all the old ladies in your life say it is. It’s kinda grossly wet. Yet Tobio seems to have gone dizzy and sits right onto the ground, clutching his warm chubby cheeks between his hands.

“I kissed a girl…” he mumbles to himself, eyes wide. The fact that he’s taken it so seriously makes you kind of blush too, but not enough to make as big of a deal out of it.

“So we’re married now!” you declare hastily, fidgeting with the permanently crooked crown on your head so it. “Forever and ever, right?”

Tobio breaks out of his stupor just long enough to look up at you. In the dying sun, his face looks to be dyed with a glowing orange warmth. His face widens with a goofy, half-crooked grin that’s awkward in so many ways that it’s funny and adorable all at once.

“Yeah.”

_i promise to be faithful to you_  
in good times and in bad  
in sickness and in health  
to love you and to honour you  
until death do us part.

The Japanese people aren’t exactly known to be heavyweights, though you seem to at least be faring better than Tobio is. His face had gone bright red after the first drink or so, and now that the number had gotten too high to count, he looked to be just about one wrong sneeze close to death.

“Lean on me a little more, Tobio…”

“I’m _okayyyy_... fuck!”

Immediately, he stumbles and nearly falls flat onto his face. The overwhelmingly tall star athlete is not a man you can easily pick up on a good day, much less with this much alcohol coursing through your veins, so you just hope to God he can keep his shit together for as long as it takes to get to the washroom. If he goes down, he stays down.

Tobio didn’t seem the type to partake in college drinking culture, but he _is_ competitive to a fault. Losing at beer pong didn’t exactly do much for his already too-big ego. But you think it’s kind of funny, seeing your childhood friend—and, in a much quieter voice, first love—let loose like this.

It’s the ever-classic story; after those childhood days, which ended at a time you can’t remember, only knowing it was over, you grew apart. It wasn’t like you had become so distant you weren’t able to call him your friend. But you started liking different things than him, and he started getting passionate for things you didn’t care about, and soon keeping conversations fun like they used to be became hard. You were the type that needed distance, but this was more than just having alone time. This was accepting loneliness. After university began, you didn’t actually think you’d run into him again. You’d already settled on moving out of your childhood hometown to the city. But he had done the same, to your mutual surprises, and the spark… well, it reignited. And now you were rubbing his shoulder blades as he hung over the toilet. Tobio isn’t as pretty as you remember when he barfs.

“Here’s some water,” you sigh, filling up a cup from the tap and dropping down to the floor with him. He takes it shakily and sips very cautiously. After swishing his mouth out, he seems to look a little less sickly.

“Thanks, [Name],” he mutters, the syllables slurred. He was usually so intense, so careful… but he has a lot of sides to him. You already knew this, but feel your smile grow anyways. It never got old.

“Hey, I was wondering… that question… you answered—didn’t answer—it.”

“What question?” It took a second to sort through your fuzzy, throbbing memories before you got what he was referencing. “Oh, that…?”

Before you had made the easy judgement call that Tobio would be better hanging out by the toilet than around everybody else, you’d all been playing truth or dare. It’s a party staple, after all. For you, you’d taken truth, and gotten the question:

“Who was your first kiss with tongue?”

Of course you remember the kiss in the field, but that doesn’t count. That was a sloppy lip smash between kids who had practically been babies. So it might’ve been your first kiss, technically, but it wasn’t what the question was asking for.

“Uh… some guy in middle school.”

“What?!” he exclaims, sounding offended, whipping his head up clumsily and staring at you blearily. “Who?!”

“You… wouldn’t know him.” It’s painfully awkward to talk about. You’d probably feel better discussing this with your father, cringing as you ramble. “It didn’t really mean much. We weren’t even dating or anything—”

“Agh… even you.” His head drops with real anguish.

“Tobio?”

“So what if I didn’t get my first tongue kiss yet!?” he practically shouts, sudden reinvigorated. You’re sure all the people back downstairs heard it. He sounds irrationally upset as he jerks his head back up to glare at you. The red might’ve been from Asian glow or an embarrassed blush, but it almost seemed to radiate warmth. His eyes are watery and practically gleam. “Doesn’t matter!”

You apparently didn’t do a good enough job of holding back your laughter, and he scowls. Averting his gaze he sharply turns away.

“I just thought… if you… whatever.”

You’re more sober than he is, by far. So you should be the one making rational decisions. But you don’t—yeah, you know better, but you just don’t want to think about that right now. You want to think about _him_. You gently lift his head up with both hands and pull him towards you. It isn’t just a peck. You coax his lips open, tasting the melange of bitter spirits under his tongue; but it grows hotter, wetter, messier, stronger, fiercer—

Deliberate. _Real._

the way you feel when you first kiss him  
for the first time.  
like fire within your bones.  
like your soul has returned to the water.  
like every part of you that came  
from a dead star  
is alive again.

“Do you think we’ll meet again?”

It’s a question that’s been on both of your minds, but never been said. Once it’s said, it’s material. Physical. Deliberate. Real. The weight drops on your soul and you suck in a tight breath, like you’ve been physically wounded.

“I hope so,” you said tentatively. Honestly.

“But maybe not.”

You try not to show how much that hurts on your face.

Even though the two of you had kissed so long ago and now, so recently, it was drunk. And when you’re drunk, nothing matters, even if it had been everything for you in that moment. He hadn’t remembered at all the next day, and you didn’t have the courage to ask if he was just pretending that he didn’t. You called it ‘respect’, keeping it a secret from him. Actually, it was cowardice. The fear that your childhood friend, after all these years, didn’t love you back.

“How about this?” you blurt out desperately, too stubborn to just let things go. “In ten years, on this day, we’ll meet up again. Back home, in that field where we had our pretend marriage. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah,” he says, softly, and it warms your heart that he does. He looks up at you and nods. “Okay. In ten years, we’ll definitely meet again.”

You don’t know what you’re hoping for. That, after all this time, with ten more years apart he’ll suddenly fall in love with you. That he’ll realize that you were the one who was always there, even when you kind of weren’t. That even when you fell out of love, he was still the “one”, and would always be the one. That when you fell back into love, you knew it was because you could never move on from him. That you still remember that dandelion crown. Vows are forever. Rings are circles, infinite.

Only, he already seems so far.

_before I fell_  
in love with words,  
with setting skies  
and singing birds—  
it was you I fell  
in love with first.

You should’ve expected it, really. With the book with old pressed dandelions between its yellowing pages sitting between your thighs, you should’ve known better. He’s successful, a big international name—you’re doing okay, but it’d be better if he was still around. You’d thought that maybe, because the two of you share memories further back than he had with anybody else, you could somehow make a spot for yourself in his life. Somehow, you could become special.

It’s not as if you don’t blame him. Maybe he forgot. Maybe he hadn’t and was just too busy. What’s the worst is that you’ll never know. You waited too long. All your chances to ask have flown past you, like dandelion fluff riding the winds of time. You only blame yourself, even if that’s unfair to you.

You just wish he was here.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: https://deltachye.tumblr.com/


End file.
